The perils of a pregnant pause proved to be too much. Last week, EU member states opposed plans to extend the minimum maternity leave threshold from 14 to 20 weeks.

The big pity is that the discussions centred around the financial repercussions of the plan – no one talked about the wrench of grief women suffer by having to return to work with a small baby at home, and the endless compromises it involves.

Could this have anything to do with the recent Eurostat figures showing Malta as the worst performer in women’s participation in the labour force?

Over half of all Maltese women are not employed. This will set off a frenzy of more campaigns largely geared towards putting children into nurseries and getting mothers back to work. Soon we’ll hear the war cry again: ‘We’re building more childcare centres!’ For this seems to be the quick-fix solution to get mothers back to the labour force.

We are, of course, forgetting one thing: it is right and good that women should want to be with their children more than they might want to be in offices for long frustrating hours. I, for one, believe I can care for my daughter better than anyone I could pay to do it.

But the needs of the market call for mothers to be pressurised into going back to work soon after their children are born, ignoring the necessity for parents (not nursery carers) to form a close relationship with their babies.

Work, I’m afraid, is not particularly as important or as pleasurable as ensuring your children enjoy their first years. Better to be penniless at home than rich and absent.

This is not to say that between themselves, parents do not need to work and earn some sort of income. Of course they do. But first off, we need to take the onus off women. Women were neither born with a duster in hand, nor with a propensity to spend all day on their own, bereft of adult company, with just a gurgling baby for company.

It’s not a question of ‘men’ and ‘women’ and of ‘going back to work’ or ‘staying at home’. It’s a matter of both parents creating jobs which can fit around the children. Both parents need to make the conscious decision to both work and look after their children, and enjoy doing both.

To do this we need to do away with that the spirit-sapping invention of the industrial age: the full-time job. Both men and women need to work less hours. Three hours of vocational or creative paid work every day by each adult is enough.

And the rest of the hours can be enjoyed with the children. Not in a saintly, self-sacrificing fashion but in a lazy-and-loving-it style.

Anthropologist Jean Liedloff, who spent two-and-a-half years with the Yequana Indian tribe in South America, noted in her book The Continuum Concept, how boys imitate their fathers: “Before they can talk, boys are provided with little bows and arrows.”

All parents notice this: children play at doing things their parents do. This is how they learn. But if both parents are increasingly toiling away at their full-time jobs, what kind of role models can they be?

I was lucky that my father, who worked on shift basis, was very present in my childhood. Most days when I came back from school, both my parents would be there. This was not the case for most of my peers. Most saw their fathers just before their bedtime prayers.

And it’s ironic how this absenteeism is repeating itself in my male peers now that they are adults themselves: either, like their fathers, they bury themselves in work, or they have left the family home because they can’t deal with pressures of family life. I fear society will soon be paying a high price if our children are to be raised in childcare centres.

This modern notion of ‘work-life balance’ is not doing us any good. Work and life should not be two separate entities to be juggled delicately. They should be one whole. I think children ought to accompany adults wherever they go – and that includes work, not just the Ta’ Qali park.

My daughter loves coming with me to the office, and finds the drab, 1980s building of Allied Newspapers in Valletta a wondrous place (this beats me). But that’s because essentially children love doing adult things with their parents.

We should learn from history. Medieval women were equal to men when it came to work. Women were brewers, bakers, gardeners and businesswomen alongside their husbands, and their children were trained early in their parents’ trade.

And that’s the recipe for a stronger society and all-round contentment.

krischetcuti@gmail.com